


Natural's Not In It

by doctorcolubra



Series: Weird Therapy [2]
Category: Silicon Valley (TV)
Genre: Episode: s05e02, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Pining, Therapy, how do you know so many gay things?, that Cruising poster, the Armistead Maupin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-01
Updated: 2018-09-01
Packaged: 2019-07-05 05:47:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15857457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctorcolubra/pseuds/doctorcolubra
Summary: Sequel to"A Man in a Room, Gambling".  After "Reorientation" (S05E02), Richard sees his therapist again to talk about leadership, anxiety, and Jared.





	Natural's Not In It

Richard’s been seeing Mark Brevda sporadically. A couple of no-shows, a couple of pleas to the receptionist: _sorry, sorry, things have been crazy—not crazy, I mean really busy—is there a fee, I’ll pay it…_

But still, he _has_ gone back, which is a big deal for him. Richard doesn’t like to face people again after opening up to them once. Not that it happens often, but when it does, his instinct is to ghost. 

He goes back because Jared keeps asking about it. _Are you still seeing Mark? Things going okay with Mark? You seem happier. I’m glad it’s helping._

Richard isn’t so sure it _is_ helping. There’s so much to unload. Maybe that wouldn’t happen if he came to appointments more regularly. Today he’s just finished explaining the bandage on his hand, the plate glass window, the captured Optimoji and Sliceline workers. Outside the office’s huge windows, the cars are ghosting by through the Arrakis-like parking lot, blurred by the sheer grey curtains. 

Richard’s fidgeting with his expired bus transfer, crumpling it and flattening it again in his fingers. “Do you only fix people who are broken?” he asks Mark. “Do you ever take people who are normal and make them...better? Better than normal? Like—of course you do, that’s a stupid question. Interpersonal effectiveness is a thing, right?”

“Look at that, someone’s read the book,” says Mark, smiling.

“I did, yeah. It was mostly...mostly just blank lines, so—I mean it was a pretty quick read.”

Mark laughs. “A real _tief sefer._ It’s a workbook, you’re supposed to fill that stuff in.”

Richard cannot conceive of a world where he earnestly fills in the answers to a therapy workbook’s questions. Right on the page. Gross. Jared probably does it, though. Probably with perfect penmanship. “But I mean I got the gist of it. What’s a _tief sefer_?”

“It’s what a yeshiva boy would call a really thick, difficult book. Something profound, and full of wisdom, and boring. But sure, interpersonal effectiveness is a skill that we teach in therapy,” Mark says. “We teach it to broken people and we teach it to normal people, if those are the labels you want to use. But normal people are rarer than you think. What do you mean when you say you want to be better?”

“A better leader. Because what I’m doing is...not sustainable,” says Richard, lifting his hand with the bandage. “I gotta figure something out.”

“So we want a brand of leadership that doesn’t involve hurting yourself.”

“Or going without sleep while Jared develops Jerusalem syndrome, yeah. The thing is—I don’t even know what I did.” Richard flops back on the couch, tilting his head up to look at the ceiling. “You know? It inspired the coders but I don’t know why. Jared was trying to explain it to me but Jared is just like...a mom. Almost. Like you’re getting ready for your shitty school dance, you’re a pizza-faced idiot kid in a piano-keys tie, and your mom says you look like Robert Redford. It’s _nice_ but it’s also—it’s delusional. I can’t say that, right?”

“We talked about how I don’t like amateur diagnosis, but okay.” Mark’s many tonal variations on _okay_ often sound a bit like _go off I guess_ , but Richard likes that. People with seemingly infinite patience make him unsure of where the real boundaries lie. “So you feel like Jared cares about you so much that he’s never going to give you negative feedback, no matter how much you deserve it?”

“Well—no, that’s not true,” Richard says, thinking about HooliCon. “Sometimes he does. He has done, I mean. But _most_ of the time, yeah, if Jared says I did a great job, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I did. It just means he feels sorry for me.”

“He wants you to feel good.”

“Yeah.” That makes Richard uncomfortable, so he adds, “I sound like I’m beating up on him, that’s not fair.”

“You’re just trying to figure the situation out. Why do you think Jared’s so loyal?”

“I don’t know.”

Mark doesn’t let him duck the question. “Take a crack at it.”

“Because he hated working at Hooli and I said no to Gavin Belson’s money,” Richard says, although he’s not sure that’s the real reason. “That’s...what he says, anyway. And now he thinks I’m this genius who’s going to save him. Jared is—he had a rough childhood. He tells us all the time how he used to make up stories to get him through the day, like, like daydreaming about escaping with Harriet Tubman. So now I’m Harriet Tubman, is all. Except she was actually cool in real life and I’m not.”

“The Harriet Tubman fantasies were when he was a kid, right?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s not a kid now. Jared worked for a major corporation, he’s a successful adult.”

“That’s true.”

“Maybe he’s idealising you a bit, but do you really think he’s some Ivan the Fool figure who’s all heart and no brain?”

“No,” Richard says immediately, although he doesn’t know the reference. “Of course not. Jared’s super smart. And—I know you’re gonna say that means he’s right about me.”

Mark spreads his hands. “I’m inviting you to consider it. He sees _something_ in you, anyway. Right? He’ll follow you anywhere, you said.”

“Yeah.”

“Which is leadership.”

“But I’m not doing it on purpose. And it only works on him.”

“We’ll get there. Did you ever take a composition course in college?” Mark asks. “Like one that covered rhetoric?”

“Um...there was a writing course, yeah. I sort of, um, never showed up. Flunked,” Richard admits. “College was rough.”

“Okay. Well, it’s beyond the scope of a therapy session to teach you how to deliver a speech to your team—you can join Toastmasters for that. But one thing I want to focus on is something that ancient rhetoricians called ethos. You know what the word means?”

“ _Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, but_ —” Richard catches himself and stops. “Sorry, yeah, sorry, that was...a Nazi joke, that’s gross.”

“It’s a Coen brothers joke, you’re safe. But what does the line mean?”

“It means—at least it’s something to believe in.”

“Right. That’s what an ethos is, it’s something to believe in. In rhetoric, ethos means that you make your audience believe in _you_. You establish your credibility. Your character. That builds trust and connection with the audience. These guys in Greece and Rome would open with something almost like a resume. You know, ‘friends, Romans, countrymen, I come from an honourable family, I am a man of integrity, I fought in the battle of Marathon,’ whatever. They talk about their virtues and their accomplishments.”

Richard winces. “I hate that shit.”

“Sure. Me too. Everyone hates it, unless they’re some kind of marketing robot. Which I’ll admit is a common personality type around here,” Mark conceded. “But there are other ways to establish your ethos besides marketing talk. You did it with the coders by showing them that you possess the virtues and accomplishments of a great coder. You had this shared base of values, you leveraged it, and they responded. Leadership.”

“Really?”

“Sounds like it to me. What makes a person a good coder, anyway?”

Finally, a question that Richard can answer well. “Focus. Discipline. Stamina. Thinking clearly, but also making your train of thought clear for other people who might have to work on your code later. That’s why tabs…anyway. Creativity, but not—code should be elegant, it should be inventive while still respecting the structure of the language. You always want to be looking for ways to optimise, and sometimes you gotta use a kludgey solution, but the best coding is...you find a higher logic that shows you a path through the problem. Everything falls into perspective suddenly.”

“Insight.”

“Yeah. That’s the word, yeah.”

“I have good news for you. Those are all very inspiring virtues for a leader to have.”

Richard can’t wriggle out of that one. “I meant—just because I can do that stuff on the job doesn’t mean—you’re trying to trick me into having self-esteem.”

“It’s a living. Listen, you’re a good coder and so are they,” says Mark. “You’re focused and disciplined and smart and creative—you proved it. And a _faster_ way to prove it, without walking through plate glass windows, is to get comfortable with telling people out loud that you’re good at things.”

“That’s the part I have trouble with.”

“Great, so we found our problem. It’s not that you can’t inspire people. You can and you did. Just a communication issue.”

Richard’s not convinced. “So I’m supposed to…go to Toastmasters? I don’t have time for Toastmasters.”

“You can do whatever you want, I’m not your boss. But giving speeches is part of your job, so...maybe it’s a good investment of your time? Learn some public speaking skills? I don’t know.” Mark shrugs. “But on the therapy end of things, I see two problems with your ability to communicate your ethos. One is that you have severe untreated anxiety. Second is that your self-esteem actually is very low.”

“Those kind of feed into each other.”

“Absolutely. Good observation.”

Richard would never admit to this out loud, but one reason he keeps coming back is that sometimes Mark reminds him of his old professors at Stanford. It’s been a long time since anyone gave him genuine praise, without weird business motives in the mix. (Jared’s praise is different.) “Do you think I should do meds, for the anxiety? Am I being stupid by not taking them?”

“What’s been making you hesitate about medication?”

“I just don’t want to put a bandaid on the problem and—and be Xanaxed out all the time,” says Richard. “I have to be _awake_ to do my job, I run on caffeine.”

“Good point. Benzodiazepines can be very sedating, and SSRIs for anxiety are sort of a crapshoot. If you do meds, then you’d want to lower your caffeine intake in order to see some real benefits. You might find it helpful to do that anyway.”

Richard shakes his head. “I can’t, man. Our runway’s so short and there’s so much work to be done. I just constantly run on Red Bull, Monsters, Rockstars, 5-Hour Energy from the gas station, anything. Jared’s trying to switch me to tea, but I looked up how to brew it for maximum caffeine extraction from the leaves, so he said that was counter-productive and now he makes it for me. To make sure it’s not too strong.”

“I’m not a doctor, but do you think it’s possible that this caffeine habit is also irritating your stomach? And perhaps stimulating a little too much voiding of the bowels?”

Privately, Richard’s been indulging in fantasies that something terrible might be wrong with him. It’s not that he wants to be sick, just that he wants to be _right._ People might even respect him more, with a little bit of tragedy in the mix. Worked for Steve Jobs. _Tech innovator Richard Hendricks, unparalleled genius, inventor of the decentralised internet, felled in his prime by… something legit._ The caffeine thing is much more likely to be true.

“I...I mean, maybe,” Richard stumbles. “Kind of...a well-known effect. But if I’m off the caffeine and taking Xanax—or whatever—how do I stay awake?”

“Humans need to sleep,” Mark observes. “Even in the Valley.”

“You don’t understand. I know guys who use phone apps to time their extreme polyphasic sleep schedules so that they can survive on three hours a night like fucking Leonardo Da Vinci. Except they call it the Uberman schedule like the insecure twats that they are. They nap for twenty minutes at a time, six times a day, and they get up with a hot cup of Bulletproof coffee with a lump of goddamn butter in it, microdose LSD, macrodose Adderall, then head to Crossfit. I’m not going to be ahead of the game if I sleep for eight hours a night and never do anything stronger than Wellbutrin. It’s like being a boxer from the 1920s trying to compete against juiced-up ‘roid monsters—natural’s just never gonna win.”

“Do you _want_ to start using the Uberman schedule?”

“Fuck no. People think I’m crazy _now._ “

“Okay. So you’re unwilling to use natural methods because they’re less effective, as you see it, but you’re also unwilling to use the unnatural methods of your rivals.”

“I...”

“And you would prefer to continue consuming caffeine in large amounts.”

Richard shifts his weight on the couch. “I mean, yeah.”

“Even though you admit to the possibility that it’s worsening your digestive issues as well as your anxiety.”

“Probably.”

“The same issues that contributed to public humiliation at work and falling through a plate glass window.”

“Getting kinda…this is a little aggressive.”

Mark continues. “And while there’s also a _different_ unnatural method available, namely medication for anxiety, you’re also unwilling to use that, because you’re afraid of excessive sedation.”

“So the answer is yes, you do think I’m being stupid.”

“No. Medicating anxiety can be really tricky, and it’s not unreasonable to have some reservations. But if you’re not willing to make lifestyle changes at all, then we’re at an impasse, aren’t we?”

“If I bust my ass for a few years—even if it’s unhealthy—I won’t _have_ to do it long-term. When we start doing well, I’ll have time to relax. Shit, I’ll have blood transfusions from hot guys, if...um, that’s a thing Gavin Belson does.”

“Really?”

“Not that I want to end up like that, but yeah. Just...I know this isn’t healthy, Mark. I know my life isn’t healthy. I’m ready to change a lot of things about myself, but I have to stay productive.”

“That’s your choice. And I’m glad you told me, rather than just nodding along and pretending,” says Mark. Maybe he really means it, even. “It’s important to know what you want and what you don’t want, and to acknowledge that.”

Richard knows this is just therapy talk, but still, it feels good to have someone respect his decision. Even if it’s a stupid one. “I guess.”

“So you’re going to keep experiencing anxiety and the physical problems that go with it—we’ll talk about coping methods. But let me ask you, what kind of person do you think you’d be if you didn’t have the anxiety?”

“I don’t…think I understand the question.”

“Do you think you’d be more productive, or less?”

“Less,” Richard says immediately, then backs off. “Well—I don’t know. You want to get me on the Xanax, don’t you? Are you getting pharma kickbacks or something?”

“I want you to feel better, Richard. That’s my whole agenda, no funny business.”

“Maybe I’d still be in school,” Richard says slowly, thinking about the question. “Because…because I liked being there. But I used to procrastinate, I’d stay up all night working on things at the last second, I’d sleep through class, I’d be afraid to leave my room, I couldn’t…if there was nothing wrong with me, maybe I’d just be—like, a CS grad student or something. Maybe not even that. Maybe I’d be nothing, maybe being fucked up is the only thing that makes me good at all.”

“We were just talking about the virtues of a good coder, and you never said that being fucked up is a prerequisite,” says Mark. “Should we tack that on?”

Richard snorts. “We don’t have to, most coders are fucked up already. Just…you know. Maybe I would’ve been this happy mediocre guy if my brain worked properly. And I know that—like, you’re probably going to say that if I’m happy that’s all that matters.”

“Not necessarily. But would you really _be_ happy if you were mediocre? You’re still you, in this hypothetical. You’re still Richard Hendricks, you still have all the good qualities we were talking about. The only difference is that in this scenario, you don’t vomit when you have to make a speech.”

“It’s not that I love feeling this way, but sometimes…maybe, yeah, maybe I do think that it’s helped me. It’s part of—like, Gilfoyle never seems anxious. Maybe he is and he doesn’t show it. But even though he’s amazing at what he does, he doesn’t care about gunning for a CEO job himself. He just wants to do his thing and get rich for it. Dinesh _is_ ambitious, but when he was CEO, he was right there in the pink bathtub freaking out, just like me. I think they go together. The power and the pressure, and…and wanting it. Wanting to win. I think I’m scared that if I drug the anxiety away, I’ll just get complacent. It’ll kill the company.”

“You feel like your anxiety is partially fuelling your career.”

“Right.”

“I get you. Maybe there’s something to this,” says Mark, setting his pen down to shake out his fingers for a moment. “Pain changes people. Like erosion changes the shape of a mountain. It’s one of the things that brings us to maturity.”

“I don’t think that ever happened to me. Immature as all hell, over here.” Richard does some awkward finger-guns to illustrate, trying to smile. “But it seems like it worked that way for Jared. Whatever nightmarish shit he went through, it made _him_ mature.”

“Jared’s important to you, huh?”

Richard laughs a little, nervous. “What, are we gonna start talking about my relationship with him or something?”

“Only if you want to.”

The dark truth is that Richard does want to. 

“Sometimes…sometimes I wish he weren’t so nice to me,” he says slowly, not looking up at Mark. “Because I don’t deserve it, and he doesn’t…”

“He doesn’t…?”

“I mean. I think—I think he wants me to feel something for him that I just…don’t," Richard says, although he's not completely sure that's true. Maybe Jared truly expects nothing in return. Maybe the traffic really is moving in both directions. Maybe Richard's just losing his grip after months of stress. "And what I do feel for him…he wouldn’t want that.”

"So?" Mark prompts him quietly. “What do you feel for him?”

Richard’s telling himself that this is fine. Therapy. Safe space. Confidentiality paperwork. Rainbow flag in the waiting room. This is as non-threatening as life is ever going to get. If he can't bring himself to say the words out loud here, then he's just a coward and that's all there is to it. _Nothing bad is going to happen._

“I like…being alone with him,” he admits, staring at the carpet. “When he does things for me, when he…I mean, there’s nothing going on. It’s totally innocent. But if he touches my shoulder or something, I just…like it.”

“Yeah?”

“Usually I don’t like the touchy-feely stuff. I don’t know what the difference is, with him.”

“He’s kind of a special case, huh?”

“Right. I don’t know what that means. Maybe nothing.”

“Could be lots of things, sure. And you think he doesn’t feel anything like that for you?”

“He’s always so over-the-top, I never know if he’s serious or…” Richard hesitates, then says, “Like, he’s said that he loves me.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. And so…so I’m always wondering, like, does he mean that in a mom-friend way? Or does he—I’m not gay.”

“There’s no need to put a label on anything right now. We’re just talking. Do you say you love him back?”

“No. Like an asshole, right? I just kinda freeze.” Barely above a whisper, Richard adds, “I do, though. I don’t know what I want or what to call it, but—fuck, Mark, I’d run into a burning building for that guy.”

He waits for a response, and for a long time Mark doesn’t give him one, just letting the silence stretch out. Richard pauses and doubles back so often in his speech that it’s probably unclear when he’s actually finished talking. 

But after a few moments, Mark says, “It’s good to love somebody.”

“In theory. Feels like shit.”

“Does it? Do you wish it would stop?”

“Fuck. No.” Richard pulls one of the colourful cushions onto his lap, fidgeting with the seams, rubbing the pad of his thumb over the metal teeth of the zipper. “But I wish he wasn’t so nice. Because he’s into women. He actually…like I’m basically an incel without the bloodlust, but Jared gets _laid._ ”

“So he likes women. He might also like men.”

Sure. Like a unicorn. Richard’s absolutely that lucky. Definitely. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

“You were saying you wish he wasn’t so nice because…then you wouldn’t feel this way about him?”

“Yeah. I don’t deserve him, he should be with someone else who’s nice. Two nice people, cordon them off from the rest of humanity. Put them in a museum case. _Nice Humans, 21st century._ It’s so rare. It’s so…he’s so good. Me, I just ruin everything,” says Richard, and his voice cracks. He shoves the cushion aside. “I’d ruin him too. I would ruin him.”

“How do you think you would ruin him?”

“I don’t know, I just know that I would,” Richard says, reaching for the box of tissues and hating himself for getting choked up. “I’ve never had any kind of a romantic relationship that I didn’t wreck. With anyone. I’m not even—I’m not even _good_. At, at sex. I’m not good at it. Like that’s not just me hating myself, that’s a thing that a woman said right to my face. Recently.”

“That must’ve stung pretty bad.”

“No kidding.” Real hurt, the good old burn, just like high school. He never thinks about Liz anymore except for that last conversation, the sheer relief on her face when she realised that she’d never have to fuck him again. “I always thought that I’d feel better about myself if I could con some girl into liking me. But every time it happened, it was disappointing and bad. The sex was bad. I was bad.”

“You didn’t like it either?”

“Not the way I thought I would. Not the way everyone says you’re supposed to.” Richard’s thinking about that elevator ride with Dan Melcher, the dread and the misery of it. _No one can ever know._ “I regretted it.”

“Did you ever have feelings about guys before Jared?”

“Sort of. Yeah. It’s not like I’ve never wondered. All my life I’ve been called a—whatever, you know the word, I won’t say it.” Richard had rented _Cruising_ from the dusty old video store in Tulsa, as a teenager, trying to figure out if that was him. Reading Armistead Maupin. _Is this what it’s like? Is this the way I want to live?_ “So you start to wonder if they’re right. Guess they were, ell-oh-ell. Super fucking funny. But there’s no reason to think I’d be any better off. Striking out with guys instead of girls.”

“That’s assuming you’d strike out. You really think Jared would turn you down?”

“Maybe. To be professional, or just…because he doesn’t see me that way.”

“That could be, but he’s told you that he loves you. That’s not exactly professional behaviour either.”

“Yeah, but…but he loves me _unconditionally_ ,” Richard says. “And I wish it were conditional. So that I could feel like I earned it. Like I deserve it.”

“I think Jared’s the only one who gets to decide if you deserve his love, Richard. It’s his to give. And it sounds like he’s made the call.”

Richard doesn’t fully understand why this is fucking with him so hard. As if it’s bad news. As if it’s that Steve Jobs cancer diagnosis. He pulls another tissue out of the box, but ends up in a coughing fit instead of just crying like a normal person. “Fuck—I can’t, man, I can’t do this. I have to tell him, right? That’s what you’re going to say.”

“You don’t have to do anything,” Mark says quietly. “All we’re doing today is talking about it. What’s the hurry? Go home, take some time to yourself, if anybody will let you have it. It’s not an emergency. Jared’s not going to stop liking you overnight.”

“But eventually I have to tell him.”

“Only if you want to. Only if it feels right.”

* * *

Sometimes it’s like this. Sometimes Richard’s still a mess by the end of a session, in spite of Mark’s best attempts to put him back together again. He shuffles out of the office, past the unfazed receptionist. She must see this a lot, people stumbling out of therapy like extras on _Walking Dead_.

Richard finds a bathroom in the building that isn’t locked, and spends fifteen minutes in the seclusion of a stall, scrolling through Twitter on his phone and trying to get his composure back. 

Jared probably has tricks for this. Lavender eye compresses or something. The guy cries on the regular but he always looks crisp and clean. Like a soap opera star, whose tears are probably all Visine anyway. Or at least that’s how he seems to Richard, who might be exactly as ridiculously besotted as Jared by now. _You look like Robert Redford, honey._ Crying alone in the bathroom, Richard feels blotchy, bloated, snot-streaked, red-eyed, hopeless, freakish, unlovable, unbearable. 

_You’re a catch._

Why does Jared even care? Can it really be something as prosaic as the stupid list of virtues that Richard rattled off? Is it about focus, discipline, stamina, creativity, elegant code? Refusing Gavin Belson? Is it about something else? Is there ever any good explanation for why people start to feel this way?

Out on the street, he waits for the bus. Richard never drives to therapy appointments—he’s a bad driver anyhow, nervous and twitchy on the road just as he is in every other environment, and when he’s messed up after therapy he likes to stare out the window. Let someone else deal with the traffic.

The bus is also a little menagerie of unacceptable humans, which feels good. _I’m among my own kind._ Other people who can’t hack it in the car-centric culture of California. Unemployed weirdos, kids who don’t have themselves figured out yet, ex-cons, immigrants, the disabled, the poor, the elderly. And Richard, who’s just an able-bodied white guy having a bad day. 

He starts to calm down as the bus sways through the streets on its lousy suspension. Mark’s right: there’s no need to make a decision right away. There’s time to figure this out. Still, Richard bites his nails to the quick as he stares out the window, ruminating. 

The thoughts come back every time the bus hits a pothole. Four bumps in a row as the wheels judder over the pavement. Like a mantra. _What if I love him? What if I love him? What if I ruin him?_

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on [Tumblr](http://doctorcolubra.tumblr.com), gentle reader.


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